Tag: web-design

A redesign for my business facing website, over at peteoshea.co.uk, has been on the cards for a while now.

I did try and set up a second blog with the idea of keeping more technical posts separate, at least that way the website would have some useful content.

That didn’t really work out though as I didn’t have time to come up with twice the content. In the end I thought it best to try and keep all of my content in one place anyway so I ported the handful of posts back to this site.

So once again the website on my business cards pointed somewhere that wasn’t very useful or informative…

The challenge then started to create a simple, static website to explain what I can offer.

My last Monthly Review was back in March. I explained that I was going to try writing less frequent reviews in the hope of tackling some of the larger items on my list of Yearly Goals.

So now we’ve reached the mid way point in the year it’s time to sit down and work out how I’m doing so far. I’m going to go through each point in turn and update my progress on each one. This post got a bit too big to put out all in one go so I have decided to split it into 2 posts.

This first part covers the first three sections, Friends & Family, Business and Health & Fitness. Then on Tuesday I am going to post the rest.

I know this is a bit of a break from the usual Friday but I have decided to try and change my posting day to a Tuesday instead from now on. Fridays are always a little bit busy, making sure everything is wrapped up before the weekend so I thought I would try something new.

I did try and start writing a post this morning but then I got kicked off the system and my work was lost. (I hadn’t finished the post anyway so no great loss there).

The problem was due to me upgrading my hosting. I was expecting it to happen earlier in the week but it had to be done at some stage.

This will allow me to start work on some new web design work I have recently received (more to come on that in the near future). Anyway the changes had a bit of a knock on effect and I had problems reading and then sending emails along with a few other issues. I ended up spending quite a while sorting that out instead of doing the work I was actually supposed to be doing…

Anyway I think it’s all sorted now but it does mean that I didn’t have time to write a proper post this week. Don’t panic though as I have already started next weeks post so I am sure that I will be up and running properly by next week.

I created my first web page back in about 1994 and at that time there was no choice but to be flexible with the layout of the page. The idea was more about making information available rather than trying to create a snazzy display. Loading images over a modem could take a while and so they were kept to a minimum…

The internet has changed dramatically over the years and now some websites seem to be based purely around images. This can be quite visually pleasing but there is a down side to it, the size is pretty much fixed.

As more and more internet enabled devices are appearing with different resolutions how can a fixed width website still work?

This week I finished the website I was designing for an old friend HenleyHorseTravel.co.uk.

The project was great for me as I used to dabble in web stuff many years ago but haven’t found the time for it recently.

I have learnt a lot from the experience from both a design perspective as well as get some hands on experience with the latest technologies and languages behind web design.

The biggest challenge for me was the actual design. I don’t claim to be a designer so much as a developer. If I plan to get into web design—even if it is only for part of my income—then I am going to have to brush up a bit on the artistic side of things.

This week I got a phonecall out of the blue from an old friend who wanted me to design a website for him. I used to love all things web and was always playing with web pages. Learning as much as I could about HTML, JavaScript, CSS and PHP.

After a while I noticed that pages were displayed differently by every browser and so things started to become a mess of special cases for each of the browsers. As I got older my priorities changed and so along with all the extra code that was being required my interest waned.

Luckily things are starting to improve. With the improvements in browsers and the languages that describe the web pages, including advances like AJAX, things are starting to become interesting again.

With my goal of improving my web presence he couldn’t have picked a better time as I was keen to dig in and (re)learn all I could about web design anyway.